An IntEncoderFilter which sorts the values to encode in ascending
order before encoding them. Encoding therefore happens upon calling
close(). Since this encoder is usually chained with another encoder
that relies on sorted values, it does not offer a default constructor.

WARNING: This API is experimental and might change in incompatible ways in the next release.

Constructor Detail

SortingIntEncoder

Method Detail

close

Instructs the encoder to finish the encoding process. This method closes
the output stream which was specified by reInit. An implementation may do here additional cleanup required to
complete the encoding, such as flushing internal buffers, etc.
Once this method was called, no further calls to encode should be made before first calling reInit.

NOTE: overriding classes should make sure they either call
super.close() or close the output stream themselves.

createMatchingDecoder

Returns an IntDecoder which matches this encoder. Every encoder
must return an IntDecoder and null is not a valid
value. If an encoder is just a filter, it should at least return its
wrapped encoder's matching decoder.

NOTE: this method should create a new instance of the matching
decoder and leave the instance sharing to the caller. Returning the same
instance over and over is risky because encoders and decoders are not
thread safe.

reInit

Reinitializes the encoder with the give OutputStream. For
re-usability it can be changed without the need to reconstruct a new
object.

NOTE: after calling IntEncoder.close(), one must call
this method even if the output stream itself hasn't changed. An example
case is that the output stream wraps a byte[], and the output stream itself
is reset, but its instance hasn't changed. Some implementations of
IntEncoder may write some metadata about themselves to the output
stream, and therefore it is imperative that one calls this method before
encoding any data.